“DECENT” Jobs For Youth. Thoughts on hope, justice and dreaming big on world youth skills day
We live in a world that has decided that human suffering and poverty are not only acceptable, but that they are the natural order of things.
Rather than human beings having an inherent, inalienable right to a good life as a default, we believe that we must earn the privilege of not starving to death by participating in capitalism. Make no mistake, there is enough money, food, housing and clothing in the world for all of us to share, but apparently we don’t want that. We want to compete, and hoard. That will never be okay with me, and I am dedicated to doing everything I can to create and support and amplify efforts to make manifest a world where this isn’t the case, but in the meantime, we have to deal with the world we have now. This is the dichotomy that is the foundation of my views on decent jobs for youth that I’d like to explore on World Youth Skills Day.
World Youth Skills Day (today) is a day to highlight the employment needs of young people all around the world. Each year it’s recognized with massively important discussions on things like how to ensure all young people have access to decent jobs, especially as NEETS, (young people not in education, employment or training) or unattached youth as we say in the Caribbean, are on the rise. Or how to fix the fact that a large percentage of the world’s employed youth are actually underemployed, working poor, or in dangerous/precarious working arrangements. Basically, it’s not good out here for young people, it hasn’t been for a while, and Covid 19 isn’t helping the situation. Naturally we’re all very motivated to look for and build solutions because young people, like everybody else, deserve decent jobs where they can earn what they need to have a good life without having to sacrifice their mental and physical health, the planet or anything else to be honest. And they shouldn’t have to be saddled with debt they will have to pay for the rest of their lives just to get those jobs. There shouldn’t have to be a trade-off here, but in reality, there often is.
https://www.un.org/en/observances/world-youth-skills-day
So what are the major solutions being discussed and funded? Let me preface this by saying I am not an economist and I haven’t studied labour policy so I know I may be ignorant about a lot of things. However, I’m a young person and I know what I’m experiencing and what I want, and because my work and research is about civic engagement, I know that I have to speak up and make my voice heard on these issues because they affect me. So I’m speaking, but I’m open to debate and conversation about these topics and I am always learning.
Back to the topic though. For major solutions, we can look to the United Nations for guidance. Most of the Sustainable Development Goals, not just SDG 4 and 8, connect major issues around the world with economic empowerment. You don’t have to go through all of them, just take a look at the targets for Goals 5, 13, 16 and 17 for example. Economic considerations are written all over them, but you can also look at the work of the International Labour Organization.
The Director General of the ILO, Guy Ryder, has been very vocal on the issue of apprenticeships which give young people opportunities to build in-demand skills and fill industry gaps, because while millions of young people are out of jobs, millions of jobs aren’t being filled. This is called the “skills mismatch”. The idea here is that industry leaders need to invest more in guiding young people towards the in-demand industries and jobs. This is also complemented by things like better preparing students for the world of work and increasing STEM and TVET education and once you get to these solutions, you often end up talking about scale.
SCALE
So, we already discussed how dire the situation is for young people right now. Well imagine you were the Director General of the ILO, and you and your agency are trying your best to get these young people into decent jobs but when you look out to the horizon, the percentage of people needing jobs, especially youth, is projected to dramatically increase. India with its population over a billion, already has more people of working age than not, and that ratio is only increasing. The same thing is happening to different countries in Africa with that continent set to make up 41% of the world’s working age population by 2100, up from 12.6% in 2010. This is called the demographic dividend and it can be a good thing. But what if the demographic shift hits and we don’t have enough jobs for all these people needing them? See the case of China:
“During the first half of the demographic dividend (1980-95), the Chinese economy achieved rapid growth averaging 10.2% annually. However, the industrial sector did not have sufficient capacity to absorb over 10 million new workers every year for a number of reasons. The level of industrial development was low, while the reform of state-owned enterprises and the financial system was gradually advanced under the reform and open-door policy. The movement of labor between rural and urban areas was restricted. Moreover, China shifted to an industrialization policy that gave capital-intensive industries priority over labor-intensive industries. These factors had the effect of confining large numbers of young workers to the agricultural sector in rural area.” Oizumi, 2006
So it makes sense that many policymakers are invested in scalable solutions - big businesses that can hire thousands and millions of people. There’s also some focus on soft skills like creative thinking, adaptability etc., because as we push forward with big business especially in tech, these also become more important. So yeah, it’s a big conversation and I’ve barely scratched the surface but when I check out social media, or I go to conferences on youth employment, or read about it in the news media, these are the things that come up most often and so they are shaping the global discourse on this. Obviously they’re important, but I do think we need to broaden this conversation.
Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels
If you know me, you know I’m often the person who stops these kinds of conversations, rolls back to the why, the how and the dream and then build forward from there. I go back to the lived experience of the most vulnerable people experiencing the problem, how they got there and what they should have if we fix the problem. We know the “why” here. Young people are suffering and are projected to suffer even more. We also know, but do not necessarily agree on, the how nor the dream.
As a Black Caribbean Feminist, I cannot talk about decent jobs, nor organize around decent jobs nor support initiatives solving these problems without ensuring that we’re dismantling oppressive systems like capitalism and racism because if we’re not cognizant of these systems we will replicate them in the solutions, leading to more suffering. I have a serious problem with conversations about scale because they rarely include conversations about how big businesses (especially in tech) are often exploitative, relying on cheap labour, overworking their employees, treating them horrifically, manipulating governments, damaging the planet etc. I cannot think of a single mega corporation around the world that isn’t implicated in some practice that is taking us further away from achieving the sustainable development goals and I’ve come to believe that exploitation is a prerequisite for the level of scale we’re talking about.
I don’t have all the answers, but my dream for youth is massive so I know I have to swing for the outfield from the very beginning. I can’t just go for achievable, I have to go for just, fair, transformational. And of course it’s not easy. preventing a climate catastrophe isn’t easy and ending Trans Atlantic Slavery wasn’t easy (nor was coming up with it and making it happen but that’s another story), hell, getting some Americans to wear masks to protect themselves from Covid 19 is a task and a half. But to not fight for it… would be a tragedy.
We deserve better. Humanity deserves better and I’m all about choosing humanity. So I’m leaning into my wild, radical, crazy dream. Working hard is great, and humanity has achieved some truly amazing things through working hard, but there’s often a trade off, and the trade off usually requires the oppression, torture and annihilation of someone else. What is the industrial revolution without slavery? What is gynaecology without the torture of enslaved Black women in the USA? Let’s not repeat these mistakes. Let’s put people first at every step and make that clear in our discussions so that when future generations take up this fight, they know what matters most. PEOPLE and the PLANET matter most.
Anyway, this is getting long so let me wrap up with my suggestions for how we can do this better.
Creating opportunities for children and young people, but also everybody, to develop tech skills and encouraging young people to go into STEM is important. We’re not rolling back to the world we were before modern technology so we have to adapt. But let’s ensure that also includes ethics as the most important priority.
And let’s also balance that with an expansion of humanities subjects because they might not lead to more jobs but they will help us to understand each other better and make more human-centered decisions. We have to understand history, not the whitewashed, sanitized “slaves migrated to the US” history some of you like, but the horrific, awful. bloody history that let’s us reckon with how truly depraved we are capable of being so we can not do that. And we need civic education so we can fight for each other and human rights.
Also, ARTS ARE NOT OPTIONAL. Creativity is just as important to quality of life as healthcare or security. Stop cutting Arts budgets.
Underemployment is not better than unemployment. It’s a short term solution that often creates more problems.
Basically, ask yourself what life should look like if you solve the issue, ask yourself what is and isn’t an acceptable trade-off or compromise and and ask yourself what you need to avoid and then make sure your solutions reflect those things. And don’t limit yourself. Last year I spoke at the ILO’s Global Youth Employment Forum in Abuja in the closing session looking at the way forward and I chose to talk about Hope. It didn’t exactly line up with the High Level officials talking statistics but I know that it’s important that we believe we can radically transform the lives of people so they don’t just survive, they thrive and experience joy. That takes hope. I was cut off by the moderator LMAO, but that’s a story for another day. Don’t give up on hope though. It likkle, but it tallawah.
Also, read the youth employment priorities statement (pp. 14-17) that I worked with 4 other amazing young people to develop, based on the concerns and solutions developed over three days by over 100 young people from all around the world at that conference. It is more hopeful than most of what I read on this topic.
Okay now I’m done lol.